Talk:John Randall (physicist)

Memoir to the Royal Society
The Memoir to the Royal Society provides useful information that can be incorporated into the article. I am not sure about the copyright status of this material. See this other talk page in relation to the Royal Society Attribution. --JWSchmidt 16:20, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

John, who cares whether you are "not sure about the copyright status of this material", but you left in: (quote) Randall died on 16 June 1984 at Edinburgh. He was survived by his wife." (unquote) Why? MP

195.92.168.169 20:01, 14 October 2005 (UTC)


 * If the copyright holder of some text does not want their text to be available to the world under the GFDL, then a wikipedia user should not copy that text and past it into a wikipedia page.


 * I have done very little editing of the Sir John Randall page. As far as I know, I have never taken anything out of the page. --JWSchmidt 22:27, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Why duplicate the information that is already in the article by using the whole of Wilkin's eulogy? If there are additional facts in the eulogy, include them in the main body of the article. It is not necessary to paste in undigested chunks. To take an extreme example, you could equally well paste in the whole of "Pride and Prejudice" into the article on Jane Austen. The purpose of each article is to organise all the facts into a logical sequence. An external link to the eulogy would suffice.JMcC 20:51, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Moved copyrighted material here temporarily
Maurice Wilkins wrote this about Randall for the Royal Society on his death: Randall, Sir John Turton (1905-1984), physicist and biophysicist, was born on 23 March 1905 at Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, the only son and the first of the three children of Sidney Randall, nurseryman and seedsman, and his wife, Hannah Cawley, daughter of John Turton, colliery manager in the area. He was educated at the grammar school at Ashton in Makerfield and at the University of Manchester, where he was awarded a first-class honours degree in physics and a graduate prize in 1925, and an MSc in 1926. He married Doris, daughter of Josiah John Duckworth, a colliery surveyor, in 1928. They had one son.

From 1926 to 1937 Randall was employed on research by the General Electric Company at its Wembley laboratories, where he took a leading part in developing luminescent powders for use in discharge lamps. He also took an active interest in the mechanisms of such luminescence. By 1937 he was recognized as the leading British worker in the field, and was awarded a Royal Society fellowship to Birmingham University, where he worked on the electron trap theory of phosphorescence. When war began in 1939 Randall transferred to the large group working on centimetre radar. By 1940 he had, with H. A. H. Boot, invented the cavity magnetron, which gave a higher output of centimetre wave power and overcame the greatest obstacle in the development of radar. The magnetron was probably one of the most significant scientific advances of the war.

In 1944 Randall was appointed professor of natural philosophy at St Andrews University and began planning research in biophysics. In 1946 he moved to the Wheatstone chair of physics at King's College London, where the Medical Research Council set up the Biophysics Research Unit with Randall as honorary director. A wide-ranging programme of research was begun by physicists, biochemists, and biologists. The use of new types of light microscopes led to the important proposal in 1954 of the sliding filament mechanism for muscle contraction. At the same time X-ray diffraction studies aided the development of the double helix model of DNA by Francis Crick and J. D. Watson in 1953 at Cambridge. Randall was also successful in integrating the teaching of biosciences at King's College.

In 1951 he set up a large multidisciplinary group working under his personal direction to study the structure and growth of the connective tissue protein collagen. Their contribution helped to elucidate the three-chain structure of the collagen molecule. Randall himself specialized in using the electron microscope, first studying the fine structure of spermatozoa and then concentrating on collagen. In 1958 he began to study the structure of protozoa. He set up a new group to use the cilia of protozoa as a model system for the analysis of morphogenesis by correlating the structural and biochemical differences in mutants. In 1970 he retired to Edinburgh University, where he formed a group which applied a range of new biophysical methods to study various biological problems. He continued that work with characteristic vigour until his death.

In science Randall was not only original but even maverick. He made extremely important contributions to biological science when he set up, at the right time, a large multidisciplinary biophysical laboratory where his staff were able to achieve much success. His contributions as an individual worker in biophysics were possibly not so outstanding as those in physics. In science and elsewhere he showed good judgement. He had unusual capacity to see the essentials of a situation and had outstanding skill in obtaining funds and buildings for research. He was ambitious and liked power, but his ambition worked very largely for the common good. The informal and democratic side of his character contrasted strongly with his self-assertion. He showed great dedication and enthusiasm in his scientific work, just as he did in the extensive gardening he much enjoyed.

In 1938 Randall was awarded a DSc by the University of Manchester. In 1943 he was awarded (with H. A. H. Boot) the Thomas Gray memorial prize of the Royal Society of Arts for the invention of the cavity magnetron. In 1945 he became Duddell medallist of the Physical Society of London and shared a payment from the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors for the magnetron invention, and in 1946 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society and became its Hughes medallist. Further awards (with Boot) for the magnetron work were, in 1958, the John Price Wetherill medal of the Franklin Institute of the state of Pennsylvania and, in 1959, the John Scott award of the city of Philadelphia. In 1962 he was knighted, and in 1972 he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Randall died on 16 June 1984 at Edinburgh. He was survived by his wife.

Source: M. H. F. Wilkins, Memoirs FRS,

This material is copyright
Unless you have permission to use this material then you are placing wikipedia in breach of copyright. This was done on 14 October 2005 by 195.92.168.169, who I believe is User:Nitramrekcap who is a sockpuppet for Martin Packer. This user has breached copyright on the Rosalind Franklin page in the past. Alun 19:23, 15 April 2006 (UTC)


 * This material is also in breach of the Don't include copies of primary sources guideline. It is not the purpose of an encyclopedia to reproduce text such as this, this is not a repository. Alun 05:37, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Serious issues regarding impartiality
This article seems to have undergone editing using Radarworld.org as a source. This website is written and maintained by Martin Hollmann, son of Hans Hollmann - the German scientist referred to several times in the article. The activities of Hollmann Snr may indeed be does notable, but it is hard to imagine editorial standards that would permit such a source to be used in an encyclopaedia. Except on Wikipedia, of course.

I wonder how long this'll sit here before someone responds or does something about it.

This is completely wrong
''John Randall and Harry Boot, two young physicists were assigned to the task. Within two months (21 February 1940) they had produced a new kind of magnetron, one with eight concentric cavities… Randall got the inspirational idea of using eight cavities when he researched the design of the original Hertz oscillator which was an open single ring. Randall saw that this structure could be extrapolated into a cylinder and then into eight resonating chambers''

I don't know where Burcham got this information, but it disagrees with every source I've ever read on the topic.



To put this in perspective, lets start with the second part first. It is absolutely the case that the first magnetrons had six cavities, not eight, which one can confirm from the dozens of places the image of the original model can be found here on the wiki as well as numerous first-hand sources. In fact, the switch from six to eight cavities is a matter of concern for Bowen, who found to his dismay that the blueprints he carried from the UK during the Tizard mission differed from the No. 12 (not 6, my bad) Magnetron he carried in the same large deeds box.

So then we have to consider the first part of the statement. According to many histories of radar development, the Birmingham team under Oliphant was fully committed to the klystron. Randall and Boot were two minor members of the team who had nothing to do with the main development effort, and had been assigned to a low-priority secondary role of developing new receiver tubes, which didn't work. However, Oliphant's effort faired no better, plateauing at about 400 W and only continuous, unable to be pulsed at higher energies. Randal and Boot then went off on their own, with little else to do, and developed the magnetron. It's not clear if Oliphant even knew about the concept until it was working, or shortly before that, and it is certainly not the case the he "assigned [them] to the task".

See Lovell starting on page 32, Bowen from around 131. But especially this article by Randal and Boot, of which only the first page is visible but clearly contradicts Burcham's 2nd-hand version.

I'll be removing all of this and replacing it with more direct information sources.

Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:00, 13 November 2014 (UTC)


 * The hand-built first prototype's cavities were drilled using the cylinder of a Colt revolver as a drilling guide, hence it had six cavities. Later the design was changed to eight, but IIRC it was plans for the former that were sent to the US (or vice versa) - hence the difference in number of cavities.